“The force with which a dominant theme can work its way to the
surface of a visual artist’s oeuvre, sometimes through many levels
of camouflage and metaphor is striking. But we accept -- that to let
that self emerge is fundamental to the artist’s life." *

In the early sixties, sitting beside a rushing stream in Wyoming making
a pastel drawing of Rainbow Trout, I began rendering the grass of the
embankment. I let loose with jagged energetic marks and felt a wonderful
sense of exhilaration. These artists’ marks expressed my personal
energy placed in the energies of nature. I have never forgotten this
moment of harmony with the scudding clouds, the breezes and the rushing
stream and the need to translate nature’s energies has never left
my work. One of my dominant themes had emerged with striking force. Sometimes
this energy is a concrete symbol such as the jagged edges of many canvases
executed in the late seventies and eighties, or sometimes it is inherent
in the highly articulated brushstroke of my current painting, but it
is always there, subtle or overt.

In 1979 I moved to New York City. My artists loft in SoHo looked into
a manufacturing loft where I could see repetitious work carried out by
the workers. I filled a plastic deli ketchup bottle with a thick mixture
of white Gesso and Rhoplex and day after day, methodically squeezed uniform
dots over all my furniture hoping to feel the boredom ascribed to a factory
worker. It never happened because the dots carried too many inferences
for me. As a Texan living close to the border, Mexican Day of the Dead
figures painted with dots and dashes as a trope for death and decay were
deep in my psyche. Pretending to be simple decoration, these dots talked
to me.

When the furniture was covered with dots, I then proceeded to cut out
paper discs or dots and affix them to a body of sculpture and after that
I dotted large canvasses sometimes with paper discs and sometimes with
the Gesso and Rhoplex.

In making my current oil paintings, the process I use results in many
random and beautiful dots. No longer associated with death and decay,
they have come to represent for me the stimuli to our nervous system
as we receive the outside world: the firing off of the rods and cones
in our eyes as we see, the stimuli to the cells as the breeze blows against
us, the glints, lights and shadows of nature, the takes and retakes of
a subject, the auditory, the circulatory, in short the working of the
many systems of being alive. Had I never experienced the intense period
of making dots, my art would lack one of its most expressive and personal
permissions.

I relate these two artistic recognitions because they are
fundamental to my work. However, some of the finest critics in America
have written about my art and their words are far better than mine. I
urge you to read the reproduced essays and reviews for further understanding.